David Rose has spent the past two months investigating the effect of immigration on one town, Slough in Berkshire. And while last week's report by a House of Lords committee found that immigration has no economic benefit, he has come to a very different conclusion.The local economy is booming, property prices are rising, schools and hospitals are working well. Is this town showing the rest of the country the way forward?
At Lea nursery school in Wexham Road, Slough, it's story time. Fourteen children sit on the carpet, attention rapt, as Khairan Nisa reads The Little Red Hen. First, she tells it in English, and then repeats it in Urdu. Finally, her assistant Wioleta Kostecka translates it into her native Polish.
Of the 120 children on this year's pupil roll, 12 have English as their first language. Of the rest, the biggest group - 79 in all - arrived at the school last September speaking only Urdu or Punjabi. There are about a dozen Polish speakers, said headteacher Kusum Trikha, with the rest split between users of Arabic, Russian, Tamil and Somali.
'I have that immigrant culture in me,' said Trikha, a migrant from India. 'I came here to do well and, no matter what their background, the parents of these children want them to do well, too, and we have high expectations of them.'
As migration has moved to the top of the national political agenda, Slough in Berkshire has been cited numerous times as a town supposedly reeling under the influx of newcomers. In this, it represents a microcosm of the broader national and global trends.
Last week the case made by migration's critics received an enormous fillip with the publication of a report by the House of Lords economic affairs committee, claiming migrants' contribution to the rest of the population's prosperity was negligible. While migrants fostered the growth of gross domestic product, the committee said, most of this was swallowed up by their own consumption, so the net benefit per head to people already living here was barely measurable. Future migrants' numbers should be rigorously capped, the report said.
Slough is also a microcosm in terms of the second, fierce political battle, over migration's impact on public services. Last year its council revealed that inaccurate estimates of its population by the Office for National Statistics have caused a shortfall in its central government grant of more than £4m. The ONS said Slough's population should have been falling since the 2001 census. In fact, following waves of migrants dating back almost 80 years, about 10,000-12,000 Poles - no one knows exactly how many - have settled in the town since 2004, as a result of Poland's European Union accession that allowed them to enter the UK freely in order to look for work.
That, in a town whose population was less than 120,000 before the Poles' arrival, represents a hefty addition; on top of that there is a steady trickle of Africans and arrivals from the Indian subcontinent, mostly the newly married spouses of British-born UK citizens of Indian and Pakistani descent, whose children tend to speak Urdu or Punjabi at home. The pressure on services such as education, the council claimed last summer, was becoming unsustainable.
But have the migrants brought so few benefits to people and businesses? And are Slough's services about to collapse? Over the past six weeks, I have visited the town 16 times to try to find out.
I began my research on a brilliant February morning by walking Slough's streets with its Labour MP, Fiona Mactaggart, a seasoned anti-racist campaigner who, back in the early 1980s, ran the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. You could not call the place pretty and it was easy to see that Slough was unlikely to become a favoured destination for tourists. There are in backyards what Mactaggart calls 'Slough sheds' - small breezeblock buildings that do not require planning permission which, in Slough, often house the new immigrants.
Yet it didn't feel like a town in crisis. The pedestrianised High Street teems with people and alongside the usual chains are not only Polish supermarkets but Polish solicitors and accountants, along with the odd Asian events management company ready to give clients a Bollywood spectacular wedding.
Property prices are still rising rapidly. It's also a compact town, where factories and offices and housing have been built in close proximity. On Wexham Road, the homes that feed the Lea nursery nestle in the shadow of a huge ICI paint works. Slough may be functional but, rarely for Britain today, it seems to hum with the gritty energy created by the fact that this is a town where things get made.
Some who were once migrants shared the fears expressed by the Lords committee and the Tories. One afternoon I joined a group of men for tea and samosas at the town's Pakistan Welfare Association. 'The Poles have caused a strain on the NHS, definitely,' said retired construction worker Amir Bhatti, who came to Britain in 1960 and settled in Slough 12 years later. 'And they are causing problems in the building industry, putting pressure on rates of pay. The wages of Asians - not just Pakistanis - are much higher than these people, because we are fully aware of the rules and regulations of this country. The Poles do things on a trial and error basis, and if a job goes wrong they will vanish.'
Others were more optimistic. 'Most of the workers in restaurants, takeaways and construction do seem to be Polish now,' said Nahid Aslam, the welfare centre's manager. 'I don't think this is a negative. The people who've been here a long time need to see this as an opportunity, a chance to move up to the next socio-economic level.'
I heard the same statement time and again: from Poles, Asians, Afro-Caribbeans and white indigenous English: 'I love Slough.' I heard praise for its tolerance and adaptability and for the opportunities it provides. I learnt above all that Slough is booming and that, far from being a drain on its economy, migrants are essential to it. And that, moreover, turns out to be a very old story indeed.
Writing in 1937, the future poet laureate John Betjeman assailed Slough with lines that achieved immortality:
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death!
The source of his disdain was Slough's economy, booming even then: Betjeman saw the town's factories and workshops not as beneficent sources of wealth but of exploitation and ugliness that degraded the quality of life. Betjeman's Luddite idyll - bombing, he wrote, would make Slough 'ready for the plough' again - has contemporary echoes in parts of the green movement.
Most of the industry that offended him was concentrated on the Slough Trading Estate, a sprawling complex of nearly 500 acres a short distance from the town centre that was the first - and is still the biggest - business park in Europe. It was founded by a local businessman on the site of a First World War vehicle depot. The buildings, infrastructure and commercially favourable leases the estate was able to provide were soon attracting businesses, large and small - a magnet, as Britain endured the postwar economic crash, for those seeking jobs.
After the Second World War, as Slough's economy returned to civilian production, its growth resumed - and with it, migration. New openings required new workers and in the late 1940s hundreds were filled by Poles who had fought in the British armed forces. One reason for the scale of Polish migration since 2004 is the extent of the roots Poles put down then: by the end of the Forties, there were a thriving Polish church and a school.
But by the mid-1950s the local press began to voice employers' fears that there were not enough people to fill the ever-increasing number of vacancies. Thankfully, there was an external source of labour to ease the pressure on the jobs market - the 'New Commonwealth' countries of the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies. One of those in the first wave of Commonwealth migrants to move to Slough was Lydia Simmons, originally from Montserrat, who years later would chair council committees and serve as mayor. Like some other West Indians, her family had already lived elsewhere in the UK, in north London, but came to Slough because of its employment prospects.
'My father had never liked commuting by train, as he had to in London,' she said. 'Here you could bicycle to work, and if you didn't like your job, you just bicycled somewhere else. When we got here in 1960, I was 16. I just walked into my own first job, as the PA to a chief executive.'
In 1964 an American sociologist named William Israel published 'Colour and Community', then a unique study of migration and its impact in a single British town. All his research was in Slough. Between 1921 and 1961, Israel discovered, Slough's population had risen from 20,285 to 80,781, of whom about 4,500 were 'coloured immigrants'.
'Some appear to view the situation as a social trauma of dire proportions,' Israel wrote. However, 'the fact remains that Slough has a successful history of accepting large numbers and great varieties of people from other places. Past experience has demonstrated Slough's ability to assimilate newcomers without severe or lasting difficulties, and in virtually all cases the newcomers have added something of genuine value to the town.'
Slough's migrant population continued to grow. By 1968, the year of Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech, there were 13,000 people of colour from the Commonwealth. The town is not Utopia and a trawl of the newspaper archives reveals periodic friction between old and new communities - allegations of discrimination on the one hand; expressions of racial prejudice on the other. But there have never been race riots in Slough, and the organised far Right has never made inroads there. Prosperity provided communal balm.
You do not need to be an economist to see why migrants might be attracted to Slough now. If the trading estate was innovative when it opened in the 1920s, it has moved with the times. Its frontage, on the north side of the A4 dual carriageway, presents an array of gleaming modern buildings, including the world headquarters of the mobile communications giant O2, Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry, Celltech, the UK's biggest biotechnology firm, Lonza, the biopharmaceutical company, and LG, the mobile phone handset makers.
In the hinterland behind lie the UK bases of Fiat, Harley-Davidson and Ferrari-Maserati, the specialist engineering firm John Crane, Crawford Steel, which made all the steel for the City of London 'gherkin', Nordson Coatings, state-of-the-art data centres, a 'green' power station supplying the entire estate that burns recycled waste pellets, and finally the older businesses such as Mars.
On the day of one visit, the news was dominated by the latest twists of the credit crunch, and the fear that its effects might spread to the 'real economy'. 'If you want to see what the real economy looks like,' said Neil Impiazzi, the estate's marketing director, 'start here.' He said the estate's workers speak at least 16 languages as mother tongues. To be sure, not every new migrant could hold down a job in an English-speaking biotechnology lab. But with 17,000 jobs on the site, a total rising steadily, and an annual output approaching £3bn, the estate's impact in priming the pump of the local economy is immense, spawning thousands of other jobs elsewhere.
'Slough is fantastic,' said Cherry Sotero, a nurse from the Philippines who settled in Slough in 2002 after two years in Manchester. 'There is the shopping centre, the station: you can go wherever you want. And the mixed culture is one of the biggest plus points. Everyone accommodates each other. They are here because they want to succeed.'
'There's no mystery about this: immigrants go where there are jobs,' said Stephen Castles, Oxford University's professor of migration and refugee studies. 'Europe's economies need migrants for long-term demographic reasons: across the EU fertility is declining, the indigenous working population is ageing and shrinking, and businesses need migrants in order to grow.' According to European Commission projections, across the EU 67 per cent of the population is now of working age. By 2050 it will be 57 per cent, with almost a third over 65.
'You can't have economic growth without migrants,' Castles said. 'There is no other way. Any country that tries to prevent migration is dooming itself to a stagnant or declining economy. Enver Hoxha's Albania is about the only one that has.'
There is, as Castles pointed out, a further economic benefit - ignored by the Lords committee report - that frequently accompanies migrants: by their very readiness to take the risk of abandoning their roots to make a new life, they have shown themselves to be ambitious and energetic, and perhaps entrepreneurs.
In nearby Southall I met Ishtiaq Choudhury, 38, who recently relocated his multi-million-pound spice and Asian food business because he needed more warehouse space than he had been able to find in Slough. He arrived in Britain in 1995 from Pakistan to marry a local woman, speaking barely a word of English. 'I was lucky. I got the help I needed, thanks be to God and the people of this country,' Choudhury said.
'If you want to be a successful person in this country and you are ready to work hard, you will be. To launch my first product, a curry masala, I drove the length and breadth of the country, 18 hours a day, introducing it to the shopkeepers I needed as my customers.'
As his business grew, Choudhury determined to put something back. First, he raised the money to build a primary school in Bewal, his birthplace in the Punjab. Now he has formed a committee that has already raised £350,000 to build a hospital. 'I am in business to make money, but this my dream,' he said.
Perhaps the credit crunch will stop not just Slough's, but the country's, economy in its tracks. However, in 2006 a council-sponsored study by Warwick University surveyed local employers about their growth plans and the jobs these would create. They reported there would be another 12,000 vacancies by 2016. Meanwhile, a major redevelopment of the town centre is about to begin, and once construction is finished is set to create a further 3,000-4,000 permanent jobs. 'The Poles can't claim benefit, so if they're staying they're in work,' said Rafiq Chohan, the council's head of diversity and economic development - a post he took up nine years ago after migrating from India as a child in the 1960s and a subsequent long and successful entrepreneurial career in the office equipment business.
'After the influx started, we did see a temporary rise in unemployment claims, suggesting they might be undercutting wage rates and merely displacing existing workers. But that seems to have been a blip: for the last 10 months the numbers on benefit have fallen each month.
'The real challenge is this,' Chohan said. 'If you want to deliver 3 per cent economic growth and you haven't got unemployment and your business people want to grow their firms, how are you going to deliver this without migration? Where are the people who are going to all these jobs? If you want Britain to be a world economic power, to deliver good public services and supply good pensions, you're going to have to absorb migrants.'
No matter what, he might have added, the Lords economic affairs committee might have to say about per capita GDP.
Self-evidently, an influx as large as that experienced in Slough in a short time causes difficulties for public services - even without taking into account the Office for National Statistics' underestimate of the town's population. For example, families often arrive at inconvenient times, such as the middle of school terms. A few hundred yards up the road from Lea nursery, Theresa Haggard, head of St Ethelbert's Catholic primary, said: 'When I first came here in 1999, we had 350 students and the roll was falling every year. Today there are 446 and we're hot seating - as soon as one child leaves, there's another on the waiting list ready to take their place. Since last term started in January, we've been joined by a Russian, a Chinese, an Indian and four Poles and none of these children spoke a word of English on their first day.
'We had an Ofsted inspection in 1999: 8 per cent of the children had EAL [English as an Additional Language]. It was 20 per cent in 2002 and it's more than 60 per cent now.
'I remember the point we realised we had a problem. It was our first mufti day and we looked around and saw that none of the Polish children were wearing mufti. Neither they nor their parents knew what mufti was.'
Such challenges are found in many of Slough's schools. Since 2003, said education director Claire Pyper, their white British student population has fallen from 8,266 to 5,878, while those of 'other white,' mainly east European, backgrounds have more than quadrupled to 2,116. There has also been substantial growth in the number of children from Pakistan. Yet the evidence is that educational standards in Slough are impressively high. 'Migration places added pressure on schools,' Pyper said. 'I can imagine that there are places that would just keel over. But we are coping.'
At GCSE last year, Slough pupils achieved 56.5 per cent grades A* to C, the 10th highest score of any education authority nationally and more than 10 percentage points higher than the English average. The town also has one of the lowest rates of student exclusion. The underlying lesson, Pyper said, is that, with careful planning and targeted provision for migrants' special needs, children who arrive not speaking English can end up as positive assets.
At the Lea nursery - recently judged 'outstanding' by Ofsted - head Kusum Trikha explained the purpose of translating stories such as The Little Red Hen: 'The home language becomes a tool to enhance understanding and conceptual knowledge: it's not as if one world starts at the door to the school and another finishes. I believe passionately that bilingualism can be a help, not a hindrance.' At the same time, work on their English gives them a huge advantage when they start primary school.
Also vital, Trikha said, is the close relationship the school has with parents. 'We have a lot of parent helpers and some of them are now studying for educational qualifications. They want their kids to go to grammar schools and universities. That gives a tremendous boost.'
Egyptian-born Yasmin Bayliss, one of the Lea parent governors, said she noticed how fast very young children could learn new languages at the school and at home. Within weeks, new arrivals from Poland 'understand a hell of a lot'. Meanwhile, her daughter Jamila was picking up Urdu and Polish. 'She pronounces them perfectly. She plays "one potato, two potato" in Urdu and now she's teaching it to her baby brother.'
At St Ethelbert's, as at all Slough's schools, the key to integrating migrant children is an early assessment of their skills and needs. Sometimes children who speak little English will be advanced in maths and science and, with appropriate help, they will continue to progress in those projects while they learn English. 'We provide what I call "pre-teaching" for the EAL children in subjects like history, highlighting the vocabulary that's going to come up,' head Theresa Haggard said as she showed me around. 'We have three Polish classroom assistants, and at first new children might be asked to do their homework in Polish.
'But you would be amazed at the progress they make. I remember a Polish boy who joined the school in year four speaking no English at all. I took his class register the day he arrived and by the time I got down the alphabet to read out his name he'd worked out his first English phrase by listening to the other children: "Yes, Mrs Haggard." Two years later he was getting level fives in his year six Sats [a standard the government judges exceptional].'
Slough has four grammar schools and another 11 state secondary schools - including Langleywood, last month classed as 'good with outstanding features' by Ofsted, four years after it was placed in 'special measures' for the second time and dubbed 'the worst school in Britain' by the Daily Mail
Much of the credit for turning it round belongs to its head, Paul McAteer. As we toured the school, dropping into lessons, it was impossible not to be struck by its pervasive air of calm, quiet concentration. 'The whole place was covered in graffiti and the kids used to stand on the landings and smoke,' McAteer said. 'Stage one, with the help of a great staff, was retaking the classrooms. Stage two was taking over the playground and corridors.'
However, 'another big factor was the arrival of a lot of migrant children. EAL pupils start at a disadvantage. But once they learn English, they fly. You get into a virtuous circle, because teachers get much quicker feedback from the work they put in, the warm feeling that comes with sense of having made a difference. Foreign children have improved our results, and one consequence is that their numbers have now slightly dropped - because the white British parents who live close to the school want their children to come here again.'
Migrants, as Castles said, spawn innovation - a phenomenon applicable not only in business, but to public services. The way to manage healthcare in a place such as Slough, said Vicki Wadd, from the local NHS primary care trust, 'is to accept that resources are finite, and to be flexible with the resources you've got.' For example, the town's high Asian population means it has more than double the UK average incidence of diabetes, a consequence of genes and diet.
Aware of the need to reach out to new communities, the trust has developed a 'health activist' programme: migrants trained to give advice on subjects such as diet, smoking and exercise, who work with their peers to get these messages across. 'It's about trying to serve the needs we have rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach,' Wadd said, 'a way of defusing what might otherwise be a health time-bomb.'
So successful is the activist programme judged by Whitehall that, having been developed in Slough, it is now spreading nationally. Other parts of the town's health service are under strain. Arlene Cardinez, a nurse specialist charged with assessing new arrivals' needs, said she faced a huge backlog of cases she was unlikely ever to clear without more staff - no trivial matter, given that last month she came across eight dormant cases of tuberculosis. But the catastrophe foretold by bodies such as the anti-immigration think tank Migration Watch is nowhere to be seen.
'If you asked about the impact of migration on the local health economy at a hospital A&E department, they might say it was considerable - because new migrants haven't always registered with doctors and show up there with nowhere else to go,' said Dr Chris Morris, from a busy general practice at the end of Wexham Road. 'Here, I would say it was pretty small.
'Here we see a lot of Poles, and frankly they tend to be rather healthier than the indigenous population. We also see some Somalis and their needs are greater: there is TB, some unusual tropical diseases, rare cancers. There is a funding issue because of the lag in time it takes between registering new patients and the money coming through. But overall I'd say Slough is a reasonably stable multicultural town and people tend to get along pretty well. I made a positive decision to come here, and I've never regretted it for a second.'
Introducing the Lords committee report last week, its chairman, Lord Wakeham, said he found the argument that migration was essential to alleviate labour shortages 'preposterous and irrelevant'. As for the argument that immigration brings significant economic benefits for the UK, this was 'unconvincing'.
Migration, he said, 'risks discouraging employers from adopting alternative solutions to labour shortages such as increasing investment in new technology to make work less labour-intensive or increasing their spending on staff training to meet skills shortages'.
Amid the hi-tech citadels of the Slough trading estate, with their burgeoning expenditure on research and development, that risk seems very slight. Granted, there is, as Wakeham asserted, greater pressure on public services. But they are dealing with it and Slough's migrants are almost all in work, and so paying tax to pay for them.
Leaving Slough for the final time, I reflected again on the report. What would happen if O2 and Celltech could not get the staff they needed? How would Credit Suisse run its brand-new data centre? The answer seemed obvious: they would go elsewhere - probably outside the UK.
Observer
No comments:
Post a Comment